[Fully Managed] Shane Walker Ep. 99 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Daniella: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. This is the podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you in your business journeys. I’m your host, Daniella, and I’m Penji’s partnership coordinator. Today I’m joined with a very special guest, Shane Walker from Cube Money. Hi Shane.

Shane: Good. Hi, Daniela. I’m great.

Daniella: Very excited to have you on the show today. We have really cool things planned to talk about, but just to get started and break the ice, for people watching who are not familiar with you or Cube Money, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what Cube Money is all about?

Shane’s Background

Shane: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, just a little bit about me. Some crazy facts. I’m the ninth of 12 children. Same mom, same dad. Grew up in a four bedroom, one bathroom house. No joke.

Daniella: Oh my gosh.

Shane: So anyways, we didn’t have a lot of money. In fact, we didn’t have any money. Things were really tight. That house was a hot pink house that we rented, and eight of us were boys, so we always loved that. Right.

Daniella: No privacy then.

Shane: Yeah. So anyways, I have spent the last 20 years in the financial planning, financial services industry helping specifically entrepreneurs in their journey with money because it’s unique. And I’m actually married with eight children to the love of my life. We love to snow ski.

Daniella: And you had eight children, so you followed in your parents’ footsteps too.

Shane: We did. We’re crazy. But man, we love them and they’re super awesome. Our oldest is actually 22 and married and expecting their first child, so I’m gonna be a grandpa.

Daniella: Wow, you’re such a young grandpa too.

Shane: I know. Seriously, that’s what I was thinking. You should see my wife. She looks like a really, really young grandma. But anyways, we’re so excited. And then our youngest is five, our youngest daughter. So that’s a little bit about us and we love hiking, camping, backpacking, and all that stuff outdoors.

Entrepreneurial Financial Challenges

Shane: But as far as professionally goes, I’ve spent the last 20 years helping entrepreneurs with their journey with money. And it’s interesting as an entrepreneur. You have twice the responsibility because you have to manage the finances of a company, a growing company, hopefully, and then also manage the finances of a household. And to be frank, that’s hard. That’s really hard because the business is generally, I’m an entrepreneur, so I get it. It’s like I’m very passionate about what I do, and so I’m a workaholic, right? And I’m laser focused in that. And so most of the time the personal finances, the money at home gets neglected and it’s a mess.

You couple that with a volatile income because you never know how much money is gonna come in or not. And it’s a challenging path to follow for people.

Daniella: A big family doesn’t make it easier.

Shane: No, no, it doesn’t.

Personal Experiences with Financial Struggles

Daniella: I am from a big household too. Not as big as yours, but a lot of the stuff that you were saying was actually resonating with me cause I’m from, we’re five kids. It’s not as, it’s not eight or nine children, but people are like, “oh, you guys are like a big family.” And we’re like, “yeah.” And what you were saying about having financial struggles, that’s like as a family, that was my childhood. I don’t think we ever were loose on money and managing the financial side of the household has always been a huge thing for that part of the structure of the family. Now that we, like me and my siblings, we’ve all grown up, so it’s different now, but I do remember my childhood being like that too.

Shane: Yeah. Oh, we relate Daniel. We didn’t have any extra money for fun, so we did a lot of things that were free. I really appreciate my mom and dad cause they had a philosophy where we worked together, played together and helped others along the way. And it’s so funny cause today, nine of us live within 30 minutes of each other and we often find ourselves reminiscing about our childhood.

Daniella: You have each other.

Shane: Yeah. It was super cool. And so it’s one of the reasons that I chose to go into this space because money can be such an enriching thing and it’s so part of every part of life. And to be frank, it’s super emotional and super vulnerable.

Daniella: Whoever says that money doesn’t buy happiness is lying. It doesn’t buy entirely happiness. But I definitely think that financial struggles really take a toll on your emotional stability.

Shane: Oh, huge. And it doesn’t buy happiness, but how you interact with it determines your happiness in a lot of ways. And especially in a relationship if you do money with somebody else.

The Birth of Cube Money

Daniella: Totally agree. Yeah. So that’s why I was thinking like, I know that Cube is all about helping with financial stability. And before we got on this call, we were talking about entrepreneurs and how entrepreneurs really struggle with the financial aspect of their private life, even though they might have the bookkeeping and all of that ready to go in their business.

And you know, as someone who’s come from a household that has also had a lot of financial struggles simply because we were a lot. Right. I think I had that situation with you, the same thing. It’s like going out to dinner as a group of seven and only my parents are paying, that means it’s like a $300 bill, right?

Shane: Yes.

Daniella: Whereas like if it’s a family of four, it’s not gonna be nearly as expensive.

Shane: Half as expensive.

Daniella: It’s still expensive. I think the world is really expensive right now, but normal things that families could probably do together for us meant such a higher number of bills. Like we were on vacation and a family vacation for us was gonna be thousands and thousands of dollars, whereas like a family vacation for my friend who only had a brother was relatively cheap. It was easier to book a room. It was easier to find a place to sit, et cetera.

So I think it’s really interesting that Cube is all about that. And I wanted to ask you about your perspective on this and kind of just tell me how it is that you’re helping people who do have these financial struggles and how you actually leverage your software and your brand to help them with that.

Shane: Maybe Danielle, it would be helpful to give people a context to why we built Cube Money. Start there and then go into that. Would that be okay? Does that sound good?

Daniella: Yeah, for sure.

Social Media’s Impact on Finances

Shane: So in working with entrepreneurs about 15 years, something happened to our world that completely changed the way we interact with each other and the way we spend money, and that is social media.

Daniella: Oh, I was gonna say Covid. That’s a little bit more recent than 15 years, but yeah.

Shane: It really is social media and what I found, here’s what happened: it didn’t change the behavior or the vision and focus of an entrepreneur. Like if you’re anything like me, you have this vision and this passion of something that you’re creating. And it is exciting and it is consuming, and so the entrepreneur, those of us that are entrepreneurs that are listening to this, we go to work and we are all into creating this.

And there’s a lot of parts of that. There’s the marketing part, there’s the financial part, there’s generally the product or delivery part, right? And then there’s the leadership. And so those things are consuming everything we’re doing, which leaves our significant other spouse, whatever, at home, not filling that same passion in a way, feeling disconnected.

And what social media did is it created a way for them to connect, and all of a sudden they see what all their friends are doing, the fun that they’re having, the things that they’re buying, where they’re going out to eat. And our human nature is to want that, even if we have a great lifestyle.

In fact, I was talking to a friend the other day and he and his spouse were looking at their friend’s new couch that they just bought, and they were like, “wow, that is super, I want that couch.” And then in several hours they were like, “oh, that is our couch.” So it was the same couch that they owned, but because they saw it online and with their friends, they wanted it.

And so what’s happened is, feeling disconnected, that spouse or significant other is scrolling and scrolling. Click, scroll, scroll, click, buy, and the entrepreneur doesn’t know. Like money and income is fluctuating up and down and oftentimes comes back and says, “what are you doing? We don’t have the money.” And it creates this explosion. And to avoid that conflict, the entrepreneur goes back to work.

So then the spouse goes back to connect on social media and this behavior is cyclical, come together, explode, go back over and over and over. And I’ve watched more and more couples breaking up and dividing because we can literally buy anything that we want in our pajamas. 40 million products on Amazon.

Daniella: Especially in the last couple years.

The Instability of Entrepreneurship

Shane: And it’s just exploded and so it’s so easy. And so spending behavior is completely changed. And to be honest, this is such a new phenomenon that we really don’t know what the consequences of this is going.

Daniella: I think also like a huge factor for this is that with entrepreneurship and a business owner, yeah, we’re not looking at stability in anything, right? There’s no stability in working hours. Most of the time, a business owner is locked in 24/7. You’re not looking at financial stability. Even if you’re getting like good money, you never know how much every month that is gonna be. Which I think really influences to the destabilization of a relationship because everything is unstable.

Shane: Oh, so much. And it also can desensitize us in where we’re really at because we don’t want to face it. It’s like better to stick our head in the sand and just ignore it than to face it. But if we don’t face it, it creates, as I’ve worked with couples, intense anxiety and stress and then conflict.

Before social media, before Amazon, before all these things, money was the number one source of stress in our world. And it is the leading cause of divorce. It’s one of the leading causes of suicide, and I will say that now, 70% of families’ money is direct deposit into their account, auto drafted out and they don’t know where their money is going.

The Cash Envelope System

Shane: So anyways, long story short, what happened is I noticed that when I helped couples adopt cash envelope budgeting, and let me just really quick: Cash envelope budgeting means you cash your check and you label envelopes for your different spending categories like groceries and eating out and entertainment and fuel and so forth. And then you organize your money, you budget your money into those envelopes.

And what happened is each time they went to spend, they would take out the coordinating envelope. If they’re buying groceries, they’d take out the grocery envelope and they would watch that money leave. And so it would change their behavior, their spending behavior, and get them in control instantly.

And I was like, wow. Even in the midst of this complete awareness of everyone else’s lifestyle and the ability to buy everything, it created that type of awareness. And so I explored and researched what is it? And the key to getting our spending behavior in check is to know what our money is for the moment we make a spending decision.

A Personal Turning Point

Shane: So here’s the problem though, Daniella. I was referred into a couple. My partner and I, who just became kindred friends. You know how those people that you just connect instantly? That’s how they were. And it was super fun. And they’ve been making $250,000 a year for over a decade.

As we got into their finances, they’ve been fighting about money for a decade. He was actually the entrepreneur and he was the spender. She wanted security and safety, and he finally came to the point where “I need to change,” and that’s when they came to us. So they had this beautiful coming together and I was like, this is gonna be so easy. We are going to make some simple changes and we are gonna completely transform this couple’s relationship with money. And it was super exciting.

They were divorced in 10 months and we didn’t help them, and it was devastating to be honest. And so this is what caused us to sit down with a payment processing developer and say, “Hey, is there any way we can take this cash envelope budgeting methodology and bring it to the 21st century?”

How Cube Money Works

Shane: So literally, you can organize your money digitally in digital envelopes and with the convenience of a debit card, be able to spend from any of those categories in real time. And this debit card is a special debit card, Daniella, by design. There’s no available balance on it. It’s a fully functioning visa debit card, but there’s no money on it. So if someone gets a hold of my number or a hold of my card, they actually can’t spend my money.

Daniella: Does it work worldwide or just America?

Shane: Anywhere where Visa is taken, it works. So how you activate the money is you actually look at your cube. Money is literally a digital banking app. You look at your app and you touch the dollar value in whichever category you wanna spend from, and within 0.25 seconds, the balance of that category.

So if you press the $250 in your grocery category, that $250 is instantly on the card, and as soon as you process the card, it returns the card to a zero available balance and closes that category. And it reflects the money you just spent in real time.

So it changes this whole budgeting experience from looking at your money through the rear view mirror. You know the budgeting apps that feed in the transactions, you categorize them afterwards. Well, you’ve already spent the money. It’s too late, and all you’re doing is looking for your mistakes, which never makes us feel good.

And actually, when you point out mistakes, it doesn’t change behavior. What effectively changes behavior is when you can look at your money through the windshield and make decisions in real time based on your money is when you make better decisions, and that’s what Cube Money empowers couples to do together and actually empowers an individual to do it to themselves as well.

But it just allows you to simply, easily, automatically, when your check comes in, it’s organized based on your plan, based on your categories, and then each time you spend, you just simply look so you know what your money is for in the second that you’re making a spending decision.

Awareness While Traveling

Daniella: That’s, I think a really groundbreaking thing. I think, for example, when I travel, right? Like if I’m going on vacation or something, that’s huge. The moment when budgeting is important because you need to see how much money you’re spending on this trip.

Shane: But most people, that’s when they don’t think about it all. Cause they’re like, “I’m on vacation, I’m not gonna think about it.” But then they come home with this big credit card bill and they’re paying interest and it’s so frustrating.

Daniella: And I remember going to, okay, I’ve traveled a lot in Asia. The conversion rates in money – for example in Vietnam, I think I remember exchanging about $400 and they gave me more than a million dong. Which is insane because I’m not familiar with the conversion rate, so it was really hard for me to just walk down the street and think, “oh, this is 75,000. How much is that in dollars?”

I have to think and I think that enables people to spend more because you’re not even aware of how much money you’re actually spending cause you’re not familiar with that country’s currency. It’s easy to convert from euros to dollars. It’s easy to convert from Mexican pesos and money that you’re a little bit more familiar with. But it happened to me a lot, like with Japan, I had the same issue and you know, Japan has so many cool things to buy, so I was just like, “how much is 10,000 yen?” And I think it’s huge cause then you don’t know, you’re not budgeting. I tried once to write on my notes app every single expense that I was having, but that’s so tiresome.

Shane: It’s so much work. And that analogy is actually so reflective of what’s happening actually with our money in dollars. We know how much it’s worth, but we’re just not, most people aren’t aware where it’s going. They’re just, they don’t know where it’s going. And how many of us are like, “wait a minute, I just paid myself $4,000. Where’d it go?”

Daniella: The subscriptions that we pay for that we don’t even remember.

How Cube Organizes Your Money

Shane: Well, yeah. And it’s like we have the same, oftentimes the same bills, whether it’s rent or a mortgage and a power bill and a phone bill and so forth. But with our current banking structure, all that money being in one location, it’s hard to mentally account for everything without being able to organize it.

And so Cube is simply the ability to say, okay, I need this much for my rent or my mortgage. Here’s for my phone bill. Here’s for this, and all those payments actually happen automatically. You don’t have to open any of the categories that are for bills. Those, you just simply have their own unique card and own unique account, which keeps the money really secure. But you can set up all those automatic payments.

But then now the money that you have set aside for groceries and for fun and for a coffee and for whatever, it’s money that you have permission to spend because you’ve already accounted for everything else and you are aware. Instead of it being like, “where did my money go?” You’re like, “oh, awesome. I have this much money to go out and have fun with my friends or to do this with my family because it’s real” and it totally changes how people interact with money, how they feel about it, and it creates really peace, joy, and freedom.

Technical Details About Cube

Daniella: And does it connect to bankings, like from all over the world as well or does it only work?

Shane: Through Plaid you can connect your Cube Money bank account to any of the other financial institutions that are connected, which is most, and so you can move money to and from. But it’s literally an FDIC insured environment that just simply allows you to organize your money and then spend directly from that organization so couples can work together, people can have awareness, and they make better decisions.

Actually, if you make less than a hundred thousand dollars a year, our average user saves between 500 and a thousand dollars a month. Not cause we control them, we just create, help them have awareness. And if you make over a hundred thousand dollars a year, you’re saving a thousand to $2,000 a month. It’s crazy.

Daniella: And what is the pricing for it? Do you guys have an app?

Shane: So we’re a banking and a budgeting app together in one, and it is $12 a month or $108 a year for the premium account. And that’s for an individual or for joint account capabilities. Gives you unlimited categories and subscription controls up to $10 a month in ATM fee reimbursements. So there’s a lot of really good features.

And then we have a family account. If you have children that you’re wanting to teach about money, it allows you to have up to five custodial accounts so each one of your children can have their own account and their own card. But you as the primary account holder, have visibility to their profile right in the inside of your app. So you can go to their profile and see where they’re spending their money, how they’re budgeting their money and help teach them about money.

The Importance of Financial Understanding

Daniella: That’s incredible. Yeah. I think we live in a world where money is at the forefront of a lot of things. Unfortunately, I think it’s made us very materialistic, but I feel as if a lot of times we struggle because we don’t understand our financial struggles properly.

I’ve seen that happen in my own personal life, you know, like whether it’s a friend, a family, myself. I think when I became independent for the first time, it was really overwhelming because I had to pay a bunch of stuff and I was a very sheltered child where I was just in my house, my parents did everything, and I didn’t even know how much money they were making a month. I was just kind of like, “yeah, that’s that.”

And so I remember sort of being overwhelmed with it and like, “okay, how do I budget? How do I save up?” Especially for people who have lower incomes, it’s really hard because I think if you have a low income and you’re not organized, it’s gonna make the financial struggle even worse than if you have high income and you’re disorganized. Because I think when you have high income, at least you can afford to be messy.

Shane: It’s true, Daniella, but it’s interesting. More money means more problems if you don’t have control because it just means you’re like, if you make a million dollars, you’re spending 1.1 million. It just makes those problems that much larger. And I’ve seen entrepreneurs that have monthly payments, debt payments of six figures because they have just expanded their lifestyle and their debt payments to fill that income and man, if their income changes, think about trying to deal with over a hundred thousand dollars in a month in payments.

The Credit Card Problem

Daniella: I think what’s insane also is that just credit cards in general have been so introduced into people’s regular spending, and I think credit cards are really easy way for you to lose control. And then you put everything on a credit card and then you don’t have money to pay for it.

Shane: There’s actually four things as far as spending behavior goes. There’s four things that have happened in a little more than our lifetime. But think about how similar the currency mechanisms or currency models of the world were for centuries, and then all of a sudden the credit card was introduced into our world and widespread access to credit became available.

Then that created the digitization of our money. So now it’s just a digital number in an account, in an online account instead of physical, tangible, which created less awareness. And then social media and widespread e-commerce where we don’t even have to go into the store.

Those four things coupled together, Daniela, have completely transformed the way we interact with money and no wonder we’re trying to figure out how to get all this to work. And you add that to an entrepreneur’s life where they’re trying to manage all that inside of a business with all of the lack of structure and the lack of guarantees. To then trying to do that personally.

And so what we’ve done is we’ve created a banking system for the personal life to make that so easy. Now, I will say that just like when you went out on your own and you started doing money yourself, it took some time figuring that out. The same thing when you start using Cube Money, there is a 30 to 60 day transition period where you’re getting your money to start to behave like you want it to.

You’re getting it in organization and in a system, so it’s easy. But once you get past that and you get in your routine, everything is automated. And everything is clear, like you have awareness and the thing that we hear the most from entrepreneurs is, “I can’t believe how easy this is. I cannot believe how much this has changed my relationship with my significant other, my spouse. I can’t believe how much control I have. I can’t believe how confident I am.”

And those are beautiful things. If you go to the app reviews, then you can see that. So anyways, it’s been so fulfilling to see this. This has been a super big and hard project to create, but it’s really neat to see the impact that it’s having in people’s lives. I love it.

Personal Financial Experiences

Daniella: I really love when a business owner has a heartfelt message. I think it’s really important to be connected to your business. And I think that that’s really great that you have that emotional connection to what you’re doing. And it is like a great project.

I think what to me is really interesting is how digitalized money is nowadays and how Cube can actually help with that. When I got independent for the first time, I got a scholarship, for context. And my scholarship provided me with a thousand dollars a month, give or take, to basically finance everything. So I had to have money to pay school at the end of the semester, and I had to find an apartment, pay that rent, and then my living expenses.

Those were kind of my main expenses at the time with that thousand dollars. I had to figure out how to move it. And I think the scholarship, the people who were giving me the scholarship, they had already accounted for that. So then the amount was supposed to be enough, but just enough for a student to live. It was not a lot of money, but it was enough.

And they told us when we got there, we went to study in another country, we went abroad. They were like, “we’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get your first stipend until a month in, like, you get it at the end of the month. So you need money for that first month because you’re getting settled. You’re paying, you’re looking for a new place. You just moved to a different country. You need to buy basically every single appliance.”

And they told us that we would need about 2000 to $3,000 to show up with. And that should be enough to get us settled. And then we were gonna start getting the payout for the scholarship, but we had to figure out how to manage that initial money that we had showed up with.

The Cash-Only Approach

Daniella: And I remember, I don’t know why, I took all that money in cash. I flew with all of that in cash. I counted that in a table because I was so afraid of having it in a bank account because I felt like if it wasn’t tangible, if I couldn’t see it or touch it, I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t count it. And I was terrified of making a big mistake with it. And I wasn’t gonna be in a foreign country and have no financial backup, you know?

So I was terrified. And I remember having, even after we got that stipend, I ended up spending less than the money that I had brought initially. So I had some extra as savings I guess. I put it all in an envelope and I stacked it at the bottom of my closet, and those were my savings.

And I think it was really hard for me to mentally transition into doing that digitally. At the time I think I was just, it was very scary for me and I remember my mom telling me like, “how can you not use online banking? Like you’re younger than me and you’re acting like you’re from the 1940s.” And I remember being like, “mom, I just need to see the money. I need to count it with my hands and then separate it and then put a little paper over it that says rent.”

So I think digitalizing things – I don’t know if other people have felt that sort of difficulty, but I was always doing that, wanting to do everything with cash cause I felt like it made more sense and it took me a while to figure out that that was not sustainable.

Shane’s Personal Story with Credit Card Debt

Shane: It is, it really isn’t in today’s world. Let me share an experience with my wife and I – both of us came from lower middle class homes. So not a lot of money. And after we got married, my wife’s parents showed us the Marriott Rewards card, the Bonvoy card, and then also the Southwest Chase card. Both of them are Chase. And how you could sign up and get 80,000 rewards or points by spending $3,000 and then just spending another $20,000, you would get a free companion pass so that we could fly back from college back home and things like this.

And I was like, “wow, that is incredible. Like they will give us free money.” And so anyways, we started utilizing those cards for my business. We got a business card and then we got a personal card. Long story short, we had that same thing you were talking about with the fluctuating income going up and down and a lot of uncertainty on what was happening.

I am actually the spender in my relationship as well. My wife, she wore the same Doc Marten shoes from eighth grade and into our marriage, and I threw those things away and gave her new shoes because they were as ugly as could be. But she didn’t feel good about how we were spending money that we didn’t have, Danielle, to be honest, because it was just so easy to swipe and go. And through this time, I didn’t feel good about it. My wife didn’t feel good about it at all, and we often, she was like, “we shouldn’t be doing this.”

But I was like, “I’m gonna make more money. It’s coming in like I’m working really hard” – these kind of conversations. And so she always was like, “are we making money? Are we not making money?” And I was consistently checking our bank accounts to make sure that we were gonna have enough money to pay off the credit card and I would project my income out. It was a lot of stress.

Well, after a few years, we found ourselves over a hundred thousand dollars in credit card debt because business didn’t go like we thought. It was a place where we never thought we would be, a place that our parents never were. And it was so stressful.

And I actually remember having a conversation with my wife, and by the way, what am I doing for work? I’m teaching entrepreneurs how to get their money to work, and she asked me a question that changed my life and she said, “Shane, how do you feel comfortable teaching other people about money when we have over a hundred thousand dollars of credit card debt?”

Daniella: That’s such a hard question.

Shane: And from that moment I was like, “we have got to change.” And we tried to budget and did all these things, but it wasn’t until we started using Cube Money, like we were one of the first on it that we started to become aligned. We had awareness, and from that point forward, we started to save several thousand dollars a month because we were making more money by that time and so forth.

So anyways, it is a really beautiful thing when you can finally face your money and really create a plan and have a system that helps you follow it.

Daniella: Yeah, I think that’s the key to this whole conversation is just the system that you guys can provide. With this whole story that I shared about me doing everything with cash, that was my problem. I didn’t have a reliable system and I was afraid of doing it digitally.

Shane: Well, because you lose control and it really is true. And I actually applaud what you did in keeping it tangible, keeping it physical. You did a better job than most people do with managing your money.

The Lost Cash Incident

Daniella: I mean, I think I actually had a lot of problems because I moved out about a year into living in Taiwan. That was where I was going to college. A year into my life there, I moved to a different apartment and I still had everything in cash. I lost money during the move. I couldn’t find it.

The money would get deposited to a bank account and then I would just immediately withdraw it so that I could count it. And up to that point, it had been working for me. And I think I had been relatively organized. I had to save up about $200 a month from what I was getting paid to pay for school at the end of the semester with that scholarship.

The point is that I remember I had been able to save up for all of these bigger expenses. And for some reason when I moved, I put all that money in a yellow envelope and I put it in my backpack. And I don’t know what happened because I was moving stuff around. I lost some of it. I don’t know if people stole it cause I didn’t hire any moving companies. I did it all myself.

I probably lost it and when I actually got to my new place and I was unpacking, I would take out cash and then I would say like, “okay, I’m gonna have $30 today and I cannot spend more than $30 today.” And I didn’t have any cards on me, so I would only have that cash to spend daily. And when I was doing that, I thought I was being so organized and so disciplined.

And I start counting my money and I lost, I think maybe a quarter of what I had, and I still don’t know where it went. And I think that’s when I realized I should probably not have it all in cash on me all the time.

Shane: Wow, Daniella, when you discovered that you lost it, what did you do? How did you feel?

Daniella: I freaked out. I mean, I remember I was freaking out. I started looking for it everywhere. I started asking everybody about it. I called the public transportation system. Nobody had it. To this day, I have no idea where it went. The envelope where I had it was sealed, so I don’t think anybody stole it. I genuinely think I forgot some of it at the apartment and I just didn’t notice until it was too late.

I asked the lady at the apartment to check and she said that she had already sent a cleaning company and that they didn’t find anything. So maybe the people from the cleaning company found it and they were like, “yeah, I’m just keeping this.” Which I don’t blame them.

Shane: That’s funny because that was actually one of the reasons why when we would help couples with using physical cash envelopes, that was one of their biggest concerns. They were worried about getting stolen or being at risk because they pull out a big wad of cash or losing it. And I’ve lost several hundred thousand dollars, it’s like a kick in the gut.

Daniella: Yeah, what a waste. I was lucky that my parents had taken out this debit card from my country. So I’m from El Salvador. I live here. So I had a Salvadorian debit card and my parents, I told them and they were like, “fine, we’ll transfer some money just so that you can make it to the end of the month.” Cause I was also in the middle of a move, which was worse I think because moving is expensive. People don’t talk about how much money you spend when you’re moving to a different place.

And they were like, “you can’t not have money right now.” So they deposited money to that debit card. And then that’s where I started using it. And then I remember my mom just was like on the phone, “you need to stop having so much cash on you all the time.” 

Personal Finance Stories

Daniella: And that’s when I was like, yeah, she’s right. And then I sort of changed my ways.

Shane: Oh man, that’s amazing. What a story, Daniella.

Daniela: I guess like growing pains. I was 17 at the time.

Shane: Isn’t it so funny? Really, money is one of the most dynamic topics in the world.

Daniella: Yeah, it really is because it’s so part of who we are, how we feel about other people, how we feel about things. Like we all just interact with it so differently. And our behaviors with it is so different.

Shane: I think it really affects a lot of times. I mean, my day was ruined when I lost all that money. You know, when you lose money, getting money stolen and stuff like that. All of that can really affect emotional stability.

Daniella: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. You’re exactly right.

The Impact of Financial Alignment

Shane: So, I’ll tell you, this has been a really fun conversation and we actually didn’t get into marketing. But when I have found that when my wife and I got aligned around our financial goals, that’s when my business really began to grow because it took the stress and the emotional rollercoaster of finances was finally gone. And so I had this calm about our personal finances and our unified plan to move forward so I could really focus on the business and growing it and building leadership and so forth. So when we get our personal finances as entrepreneurs, when we get our personal finances in order and get aligned with our significant other, it frees up so much energy – mental, emotional, physical – to move towards growing the business in the way we really want to.

Daniella: Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think financial stability is the key to a lot of things. You don’t have to be a millionaire, but you need to have them organized.

Shane: Yes.

Wrapping Up

Daniela: And now Shane, we’re almost out of time. We did not talk about marketing, but that’s okay. It was a great conversation anyway. I love it. And financial stability is important for entrepreneurs. Before we finish the podcast, I wanted to give you the space to plug anything that you wanna plug. If you want to send anybody your way of anything that we spoke about today resonated with them, if you want to talk to people, if somebody would want to use Cube, the floor is yours.

Shane: Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that, Daniella. I just wanna reiterate that the key to changing spending behavior, getting spending behavior in line with who you really want to be is to know the purpose of your money in the moment that you make spending decisions. It changes everything, even with all of the marketing techniques and what we’re faced with with social media and online buying in today’s world. It gives you the presence of mind to make good decisions around money, and that is what Cube Money is all about.

And if you want to learn more about Cube Money, go to cubemoney.com. That’s QUBE money.com. And get started to create an account. Now just know we are a banking organization, so we have to make sure that you’re you. So there is personal information that you’ll provide through that signup process so that we can verify based on regulations.

We are only in operations in the United States of America today, so that’s important to know that although our card you can use anywhere Visa is used, in order to have an account, you have to reside in the United States of America. But if you use the discount code, “getcubed” at checkout, so after you go through the account creation process, you make your first deposit, if you use getcubed, G-E-T-Q-U-B-E-D, you’ll get 60 months for free. And I’m excited to hear your story. It is amazing when we get money to do what we want, how much fun money can be, and what it can accomplish in our lives. So with that, Daniella, I’ll turn it back to you.

Daniella: Amazing. Yeah. I will be adding the links to all of this to the description of our video for everybody watching, and I will see you guys on the next episode. Have a great day.

Shane: Thank you.

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